Winter Gardening: Eliot Coleman

For more than 30 years, Eliot Coleman of Harborside, Maine, has successfully grown food in winter without heated greenhouses. Think outside your zone. Each winter, his gardens head south, to Georgia, without moving an inch.

How? For every layer of protection–a cold frame, for example–the growing environment shifts 500 miles. By doubling up, says Coleman, winter farmers never have to contend with frozen soil, not even when the mercury drops well below zero. “You might get a little surface freezing, but by 10 a.m. it will be unfrozen,” he says. “The minute the sun comes out, all of a sudden it’s 50 degrees in there. We’ve never had a day when we couldn’t put seeds in the greenhouse beds.”

No comments yet.

We reserve the right to remove or edit comments that are offensive or disrespectful to our readers and/or writers, cannot be verified, lack clarity, or contain profanity. Your comments may be republished by Yankee Magazine across multiple platforms.

Popular Articles

Today's Home Hint

The intense heat from a chimney fire is likely to crack the bricks in the chimney, making it easy for the fire to ignite any woodwork that’s in contact with it. For this reason, keep all structural members at least 2 inches from a chimney.